Apparatus and method for improved illumination area fill

A method for illuminating a surface comprising:

• providing a reflector having an aperture and a shape defined by a three dimensional reflector surface;
• radiating light from a light source whose intensity varies as a function of the angles of the light rays radiated from the light source in a three dimensional radiation pattern, and
• reflecting light from the reflector, the reflector being proximate to the light source, defining a system angle by its aperture and allowing directly radiated energy to propagate from the light source through the aperture of the reflector to the surface to provide a directly radiated energy distribution pattern on the surface to be illuminated defined as the illuminated surface,
• where providing the reflector comprises defining the shape derived from a transfer function,
• which has as inputs:
• the three dimensional radiation pattern of the light source;
• beam parameters, including a light source-to-illuminated surface distance and beam diameter;
• system parameters of the reflector including reflector size and aperture size of the reflector;
• and
• a user selected composite energy distribution on the illuminated surface;
• and which has as outputs:
• an amount of directly radiated energy propagating through the aperture of the reflector;
• and
• a remainder of the total available radiated energy from the light source less the energy of the light directly radiating to the illuminated surface through the reflector aperture;
• and
• a calculated position and orientation of each point on the reflector as a function of angle needed to provide the user selected composite energy distribution on the illuminated surface, which calculation defines the shape of the reflector necessary to provide a reflected energy pattern to overlay the directly radiated energy pattern to form the user selected composite energy distribution on the illuminated surface.